Friday, 30 May 2014

The Zombie Scourge and a Very Leggy Python

Welcome to another installment of the blog that attempts to explain
everything in the whole universe one question from a member of the public at a
time.

Nance asked:
I've read that the sandwich was named for its inventor, the Earl of Sandwich.
Was he really the first?

The Earl of
Sandwich was not, of course, the first person in history to eat a sandwich. He
was the first filling. Medicine in Georgian times was primitive, painful and
dangerously Latin, and so the wealthy elite sought other ways to alleviate
illness. This lead to the flourishing of spas where the affluent indisposed would
flock to be cured without the help of a doctor by taking the waters, and thus
towns such as Leamington, Cheltenham and Bath grew phenomenally rich. The small
seaside town of Sandwich was not so lucky, and its Earl looked on the prosperity
of the spa towns with envious eyes. But while his own town had no hot spring it
did have a larger than average bakery, and so the lateral-thinking Earl set
about luring the peaky but loaded to Sandwich to “take the bread”. A typical
treatment involved the patient lying for hours at a time between two giant slices
from a white split tin loaf, while for the more seriously-ill the Earl
recommended a whole-meal bloomer, with a poultice of mustard or possibly
mayonnaise. But at the height of his fame disaster struck when the Earl,
attempting to prove the medical benefits of bread and cheese at higher
temperatures had himself placed inside an eight-foot wide Welsh Rarebit and put
under a giant grill. He became the toastie of the town.

Classical
scholars believe that Plato wrote extensively about wireless broadband and they
presume that he would have posited that a paradigm of WiFi existed in a state
of perfection forever beyond the reach of direct human experience. Sadly we
will never know for certain as he found it impossible to post his blog about
this from his cave, where the WiFi coverage was invariably awful.

Stu BealeHow did
the first snake to evolve not having legs decide this was a good idea? And
since I may have missed one in my question, do hyphens matter?

The earliest
snake ever to be found in the fossil record was a python, but unlike modern
pythons this prehistoric specimen was a short, stubby animal with twenty
muscular legs. It was known as the Twenty-Foot Python. But a freak mutation in
the snake’s DNA lead to it losing the hyphen thus turning it into the long,
limbless reptile we know today.

Nick asked Where are you going for your
holidays?

Cornwall.
It’s possible this wasn’t intended as a question for the blog but sometimes
it’s hard to know where having a chat ends and academic inquiry begins.

And now in a new feature that reflects our efforts to keep SKOE at the forefront of cynical populism we've asked a leading British political figure to answer our final question this week:

Well exactly
and I’m hearing this on doorsteps up and down the land because in spite of what
the liberal elite with their facts and information will tell you zombies are a
real and growing problem both in my imagination and in the imagination of the
many people I’ve frightened. For instance let me finish please if a group of
zombies moved in next door to me I’d be worried and that’s not racist actually because
these zombies are white except for the occasional greeny-grey bit and more to
the point I’ve researched this anecdotally and on Netflix and it’s is
practically a fact that of the human brains feasted on by ghastly blank-eyed abominations
97% are down to zombies and yes certainly the other 3% are Heston Blumenthal but
my point is that decent hard working people alive in Britain today never voted
for this and that’s why we’re the only party brave enough to ask the question
Zombie Apocalypse Yes or No and while we’re at it Climate Change is mainly down
to gay marriage.

That’s all
for now, but do post a question in the comments below and we’ll get the
Universe explained in its entirely before you can say Jack Robinson a billion
times incredibly slowly.

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About Me

I'm a writer and producer, making comedy shows on the radio and tv. Among the shows I've produced are Still Open All Hours, That Mitchell and Webb Look and Sound, It Is Rocket Science, Warhorses of Letters and Bleak Expectations. I write picture books for the under 5s including The Big Animal Mix Up, The Littlest Bird and The DIsgusting Sandwich. And I'm on Twitter as garethmammal.
The BBC think I ought to tell you that they don't necessarily agree with everything written in this blog, although they do agree with this sentence.